David Karp Is Tumblr’s Reluctant Technologist

 

By Design | David Karp Is Tumblr’s Reluctant Technologist

By TIM WUNovember 14, 2013

Karp’s “mildly steampunk” living room, with a Niels Bendtsen for Bensen sofa, Poul Kjaerholm leather chairs (all from Modernlink) and a Jason Miller for Roll & Hill ceiling light.

Ben Hoffmann

• 
  
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 
  

David Karp lives by the principle that the world doesn’t need more flashy gadgets and fancy software — which would be fine, had he not founded Tumblr.

“I DON’T LIKE SCREENS very much,” says David Karp, founder and chief executive officer of Tumblr, the popular microblogging platform. “Big bright monitors drive me nuts”; screens in the bedroom are “gross.” He takes his rule seriously, for in Karp’s newly renovated loft, in south Williamsburg, Brooklyn, screens are scarce, as is, for that matter, anything particularly shiny or smooth. It is, instead, a dedication to all that is aged, rough or both: ancient bricks, weathered concrete, blackened steel and reclaimed oak. While Karp designs the future, his personal aesthetic is worlds apart from the Star Trek flight deck or the Google campus that form our usual idea of what is to come. Karp doesn’t believe, he says, that the next century is necessarily about “more screens covering more surface area.”

He is an apparent paradox: a high-tech design leader with a home and possessions that display little affection for anything postwar; frankly, most of the 20th century seems suspect to him. Nothing in his home looks particularly futuristic, or technological, at least as we’ve usually understood those terms. A house may be a machine for living, but Karp says, “I don’t want our house doing very much.” It’s a quiet space, with few distractions; one feels that stone tablets might not be entirely out of place. The newest-looking machine in the house is the metal carcass of a classic 1969 Honda CB160 motorcycle, apparently in the midst of a living-room repair job.

The apartment is built with “analog technology,” says John Gachot, the principal designer, who worked with Karp on the renovation. Gachot specializes in solid, old-school design; working with his wife, Christine, their recent projects include the Acme restaurant in NoHo, the West Village home of Marc Jacobs and a shuffleboard club now being built in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Gachot compares Karp’s loft to a submarine, where everything is made of tested, reliable materials that are designed to work together perfectly. “It’s mildly steampunk,” he adds, pointing out a few of the details, like tin ceilings and brass screws, at least “in the sense of looking backward.” The materials and methods are genuinely old: the reclaimed oak that dominates the living room comes from an old dairy farm in Pennsylvania, and the brick and concrete have aged with the building. “It’s very open and honest,” he says of the design. “Everything is exposed, and you can see all the connections.” Switching metaphors, he compares the home to the design of classic motorcycles, one of Karp’s obsessions, which are naked machines, all working parts exposed. Above all, Karp’s home is about as different as it is possible to be, style-wise, from the tech palaces of the West, or the smart homes of the 1990s that were once supposed to be the future.

In the popular imagination, tech leaders don’t live this way. They inhabit some kind of indistinct place, defined less geographically than temporally, for the technologist is meant to live slightly ahead of the rest of us. One imagines Google’s Sergey Brin spending his days encased in advanced wearable technology, orbiting the earth in a driverless spaceship, landing only to introduce humanity to new products from the mother ship. On the West Coast, the credible technologist simply must use devices and materials more advanced than the masses use. One wouldn’t want to be caught lugging around an old Dell laptop, or, God forbid, a BlackBerry.

David Karp at the kitchen island of his Williamsburg, Brooklyn, loft, designed by John Gachot.

Ben Hoffmann

Karp’s style may not fit the public’s idea of homo futurus, but it is perfectly consistent with the image of New York’s tech industry. New York tech, where Tumblr is based, is distinguished from its Silicon Valley cousin less by technical merit, and more by its design aesthetic and its close relationship with the creativity and culture of the city itself. While still small, New York has had legitimate hits and is now being taken increasingly seriously.

Tumblr, the company Karp founded with his friend Marco Arment, offers free personalized home pages and as such is technically a competitor to Facebook and Twitter. However, the comparison ends there. Tumblr is minimalist and easy to use but also infinitely customizable; it is a genuine creative tool. Using Facebook, meanwhile, demands about all the creativity you’d need to renew a passport. As Karp puts it, “here’s your vanilla white profile page: now fill in your interests, add your friends.” He built Tumblr in reaction to Facebook, which he regards as “insanely restrictive.”

Indeed, much of the New York tech industry can be understood as a reaction to the one-size-fits-all ethos of Silicon Valley. “There’s something very prescriptive in how the Valley builds its tools,” Karp says, “even the ones that are supposed to be expressive.” Consider Etsy, which is a kind of eBay for the design-conscious; or Kickstarter, which provides a platform for financing creative projects; Shutterstock, which licenses images; or BuzzFeed, a social news Web site. The major New York tech firms, with the exception of Foursquare, New York’s popular social-networking app, either cater to creators, or depend on some tie to the creative or media industries as their comparative advantage.

That New York tech has more style than its West Coast counterpart cannot be doubted. But the nagging question is whether the East has substance as well, and more particularly, whether it can actually compete with the power, money and experience of Silicon Valley. Tumblr, which is among New York’s most successful tech firms, sold for $1.1 billion to Yahoo earlier this year, which is a trifle compared with Microsoft (valued, at press time, at $263 billion), Google ($299 billion) or Apple ($423 billion). Nonetheless, Karp, who admits “we’ve got a ton to prove,” is optimistic about New York tech over the long run. “Historically, single-industry cities eventually collapse,” he says, referring to Silicon Valley and effectively throwing down the gauntlet. “It’s the New Yorks, the Londons, the cities that have multiple industries, that are able to survive.” That’s what history teaches, he says, but “it’s really easy to forget that when you’re at the forefront of whatever industry.”

The long view of New York’s prospects is also what appealed to Andrew McLaughlin, a former Google executive who moved east and is now senior vice president at New York’s Betaworks, which bills itself as “a company that builds companies.” (The New York Times Company is an investor.) “If you’re placing a long-term bet on consumer tech,” he says, “then the mix of skills you’ll find in New York, while maybe less technical, seems like a better bet to make.” As a veteran of both East Coast and West Coast tech, McLaughlin captures the aesthetic gap as “the difference between a Palo Alto office park and a Bushwick loft.” For one thing, “New York takes authenticity very seriously,” he says, while “the West Coast doesn’t give a damn.”

“Functionality” matters most, he says, and while he has enormous respect for Google, “no one at Google spends time thinking about how to make their office park ‘authentic.’ They want it to be awesome, with robots, driverless cars, that kind of stuff.” Another difference is that New York’s tech industry tends to work with, or on top of, what’s already there, whether physically or conceptually. “The West Coast thing is to destroy what came before,” while New York is “layering and working with what’s here already,” McLaughlin says, making reference to Rem Koolhaas’s seminal 1978 manifesto on urbanism, “Delirious New York.”

Koolhaas argued that New York was a “collective experiment” in a “factory of man-made experience.” The city is the center of culture, creativity, advertising and finance: the question is whether New York tech can somehow help tie it all together. The physical spaces inhabited by the main New York firms reflect the layered approach being built into the city’s infrastructure, rather than exiled in the suburban office parks, and echo the original Bell Labs in the West Village. Tumblr’s offices are in the Flatiron district, housed on two floors in an old building with rough wooden floors. Betaworks occupies a handsome industrial space in the meatpacking district with 22-foot ceilings and cast iron pillars, surrounded by fashion labels like Alexander McQueen and Tory Burch; the building once belonged to the publisher of Collier’s Encyclopedia. Kickstarter’s offices are in a rough Lower East Side loft with reclaimed cabinets and tin ceilings. (The firm is currently refurbishing a new space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, out of a building that once belonged to the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company.)

Most of New York tech remains in Manhattan, but Karp has moved to Williamsburg, which, to state the obvious, is not a traditional C.E.O. hangout. It turns out that Karp and his girlfriend, Rachel Eakley, tried the West Village for a while but didn’t like their location. He went on a search for “old buildings,” and in Brooklyn he found more of what he loves, unblemished by “too much drywall,” which, according to Karp, has spoiled neighborhoods like TriBeCa. Karp’s loft also enjoys perfect views of the east Manhattan skyline. He looks out at the Niemeyer-Le Corbusier United Nations complex, with its broad tower reflecting water and sky. It was that view that sealed the deal and convinced Karp he could leave the island. He started thinking that looking out on Manhattan would be “so much frickin’ cooler than being in the West Village and seeing the Jersey skyline.” But not all is perfect: his view also includes an eruption of nondescript condos that have infected the Brooklyn bank of the East River. “I get so nauseated when I see these big glassy things,” he says, which look like “something out of Florida.” He denounces the spread of “generic, superbland architecture by people who decided that contemporary architecture is big glassy buildings. The stuff bums me out.”

Once upon a time, to make it in the tech industry was to migrate from east to west, where the engineers and the venture capital could be found. Yet it seems highly unlikely that either Karp or Tumblr will move to the Valley anytime soon, for matters of taste as much as anything. “If there’s any broader issue I have with the Valley,” Karp says, it’s that “you’d have to be out of your mind to live in Palo Alto.”

科技領袖的家應該是什麼樣的？

設計吳修銘2013年11月14日

卡普略帶「蒸汽朋克」風格的起居室。

Ben Hoffmann

• 
  
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 
  

大衛·卡普(David Karp)生活的原則是認為這個世界已經不需要更多搶眼的配件和花哨的軟件了——這本來是可以的，只是他又發明了Tumblr。

「我並不是很喜歡屏幕，」流行微博平台Tumblr的 創始人兼首席執行官大衛·卡普(David Karp)說，「光亮的大屏幕監視器會讓我抓狂」，而卧室里出現屏幕簡直就是「噁心」。卡普對於這些規則是很嚴格的，在他布魯克林區威廉斯堡 (Williamsburg)南部新裝修的loft敞開式公寓里，屏幕幾乎絕跡，甚至連是一些特別閃亮和光滑的東西也都少之又少。相反，公寓里滿是一些或 老舊、粗糙，或者既老舊又粗糙的東西：古老的石頭，久經年月的水泥，發塗黑的鋼鐵和回收的橡木等。卡普的設計着眼於未來，但一般人所想像的未來是如同《星 際迷航》(Star Trek)的駕駛艙或是谷歌(Google)辦公園區之類的地方，卡普的個人美學和這些相去甚遠。卡普說，他不認為下一個世紀必定是「更多的屏幕覆蓋更多 生活表面積」的世界。

看得出來，他是個矛盾體：一位高科技的設計領袖，他的家和他所擁有 的東西卻似乎對任何「二戰」後出現的事物都不太感冒；坦白地說，他似乎覺得20世紀的大部分的東西對他而言都不可靠。他家裡沒有任何東西會令人覺得特別有 未來感，也沒有什麼高科技的東西，至少以我們對那些詞彙的標準理解來說是這樣。一所房子可以是一台服務於生活的機器，但卡普說：「我不想讓我們的房子承載 太多功能做太多事情。」這是一個寧靜的空間，能令人分心的東西很少；你會感覺，也許連石碑放在這裡都不會顯得不合適。房子里看起來最新的機器，就是一輛經 典款1969年本田CB160摩托車的金屬殘骸了，很顯然，它是正在進行中的「客廳維修工程」里的一部分。

據房子的首席設計師約翰·加紹(John Gachot)說，這所公寓是用「模擬技術」建造的。加紹與卡普一起進行房子的翻修，他擅長的是沉穩的老學院派設計。他與妻子克里斯汀(Christine)合作，近期的項目包括了位於北休斯敦街的Acme餐廳， 馬克·雅可各布(Marc Jacobs)位於西村(West Village)的家，以及布魯克林格瓦努斯正在建造中的一個沙壺球俱樂部。加紹把卡普的公寓比作一艘潛水艇，裡面每一樣東西所用的材料都是經過測試並證 實可靠的，而且彼此間被設計得嚴絲合縫。「它有一點蒸汽朋克的感覺，」他補充說，並指出了其中一些細節，比如錫制白鐵做的天花板和黃銅的螺絲釘，說那至少 「是有一點點懷古的感覺。」材料和工藝則確確實實是古老的：佔據起居室的那些回收來的橡木，來自賓夕法尼亞州一家古老的乳製品農場，而磚石石塊和水泥也都 和這座建築一起久經了年月。「它非常開放和坦誠，」他這樣評價這些設計，「所有東西都顯露在外，於是你可以看到所有的連接線。」然後他又換了一個比喻，將 這個家比作卡普所着迷的經典款摩托車設計，也就是裸體的機械，所有的運轉機件都裸露在外。最重要的是，卡普的家在風格上儘可能地遠離西方社會的科技聖殿模 式，或者像那些曾被認為是未來趨勢的20世紀90年代智能家居風格。

在普遍的想像中，科技領袖們的生活不是這樣的。他們應該住在某種難 以分辨的地方，顯示的更多是時間上而不是地理位置上的不同，因為技術工程師就應該活得比我們其他人超前一些。你會想像谷歌的謝爾蓋·布林(Sergey Brin)應該每天被包圍在各種可以穿在身上的高科技當中，坐在一艘無人駕駛的太空船里巡遊整個地球，為了將母機船上的新產品介紹給人類而偶爾降落到地 面。在西岸，值得人們信賴的技術工程師，所使用的的設備和材料就必須是一些比大眾所用的更先進的設備和材料。他們不會想被人看見自己拿着一台舊款的戴爾 (Dell)筆記本電腦或者——天啊——黑莓(BlackBerry)手機到處跑。

在位於布魯克林威廉斯堡的公寓里，Tumblr創始人大衛·卡普坐在他的中島式廚房台前。公寓由約翰·加紹設計。

Ben Hoffmann

卡普的風格或許並不符合公眾對於「未來人」的想像，但卻與紐約高科 技產業的形象完美契合。Tumblr所在的紐約科技產業界與硅谷的兄弟產業並不一樣，但它的不同並不在於技術水平，而更多地是在於設計美學，以及它與這座 城市創意文化的緊密聯繫上。雖然紐約科技產業仍然很小，但它已經做出過一些受到行業認可的重要成就，而且現在已經越來越得到重視。

Tumblr是卡普和他的朋友馬可·阿蒙特(Marco Arment)一起創立的公司，它提供的是一種免費的個人化主頁，於是在技術上，它也是Facebook和Twitter的競爭者。不過，對比也就到此為 止了。Tumblr遵循是一種極簡主義原則，非常易於使用，同時又具有無窮的個人化可定製性；它是一個真正的創意工具。相比之下，使用Facebook所 需要的創意大致上和更新一本護照沒什麼兩樣。用卡普的話說，「這就是你的香草白個人資料主頁：現在請填入你的興趣愛好，並且加入你的好友吧。」他正是針對 那個他認為「局限得不可理喻」的Facebook而建立了Tumblr的。

確實，紐約科技產業里的很多東西，都可以理解成是對硅谷「一體通用」哲學的回應。「硅谷所建造的工具里，有着某種非常指令性的東西，」卡普說，「哪怕有些東西本該是讓人表達自己的。」比如Etsy，一個特別在意設計類似於為設計愛好者打造的eBay；又比如Kickstarter，一個為創意項目融資的平台；還有為圖片批授版權的Shutterstock；又或者如BuzzFeed，一個社交新聞網站。紐約科技產業的大公司，除了流行的社交網絡應用程序Foursquare以外，其他的基本都是要麼是為了只迎合其自己的創辦人，要麼就是依賴自己與創意或者媒體產業的關係來體現優勢。

紐約科技產業毫無疑問要比西岸的同行更有設計風格。不過一個揮之不 去的問題是，東岸是否也有同樣的內在實質，或者更準確地說，它是否能夠在影響力、資金以及經驗等方面與硅谷競爭。Tumblr是紐約最成功的科技公司之 一，它在今年早些時候以11億美元的價格賣給了雅虎(Yahoo)，這相比起微軟（目前市值2630億美元）、谷歌（2990億美元）或者蘋果（4230 億美元）來說，只能算是個零頭。不過，卡普雖然承認「我們還有很多東西有待證明」，但卻對紐約科技產業的長遠未來頗為樂觀。「從歷史上來說，單一產業的城 市最終都會崩塌，」他指的是硅谷，而且實際上是有力地下了一道戰書，「而那些擁有多元產業的城市，比如紐約、倫敦等，才有能力生存下去。」他說，這是歷史 所教給我們的，但「當你身處某一項產業的最前沿時，這一點很容易會被忘記」。

紐約的長遠前景也吸引了谷歌的前高管安德魯·麥克勞林(Andrew McLaughlin)，他後來轉戰東岸，如今是紐約Betaworks的 高級副總裁。這家公司把自己標榜為「一家創建企業的企業」。（紐約時報公司[The New York Times Company]是投資者之一。）「如果你要在消費者科技產業上下長遠的賭注，」他說，「那你在紐約能找到的技能組合似乎是一個更值得押的賭注，哪怕它或 許並不那麼純技術化。」在東岸和西岸都算得上資深人士的麥克勞林，將兩者在美學上的差距看成是「一家布殊維克公寓和整個帕洛阿爾托辦公園區的區別」。他 說，其中一方面就是，「紐約對於真實本真性是看重的，」他說，而「西岸卻對此不屑一顧」。

他說，「功能性」是最重要的，而雖然他很尊重谷歌，但是「在谷歌， 里沒有人花時間去想怎樣將他們的辦公園區變得『真實』。他們想要讓它令人驚嘆，擁有諸如機械人、無人駕駛汽車之類的東西」。另一個區別是，不管是實體還是 概念，紐約的科技企業傾向於以既有的東西為基礎，或者在這些東西上發揮，無論是實際存在的實體還是一些概念。麥克勞林說，「西岸企業的作風是要摧毀舊有的 東西」，而紐約則是「層層遞進，在已有的東西上發揮」，麥克勞林這樣說道。他引用了雷姆·庫哈斯(Rem Koolhaas)1978年關於城市化的開創性宣言：《癲狂的紐約》(Delirious New York)。

庫哈斯認為，紐約是一個在一家「人造體驗工廠」里進行的「集體實 驗」。這座城市是文化、創意、廣告和金融中心：問題是紐約科技產業是否能夠以某種方式將所有這些東西聯繫起來。紐約主要大型企業辦公室所處的物理空間，反 映了一種多層次的建築方式，將企業建設在城市的基礎設施當中，而不是另僻一塊郊外的辦公園區，同時也與西村最初的貝爾實驗室(Bell Labs)相呼應。Tumblr的辦公室所在的地方，是熨斗區：一幢有粗糙木質地板的舊建築里的兩層樓。Betaworks則在肉庫區里佔據了一塊漂亮的 空間，裡面有22英尺高的天花板和鑄鋼鐵支柱，周圍包圍着的是像亞歷山大·麥昆(Alexander McQueen)和湯麗柏琦(Tory Burch)這樣的時尚品牌；這座建築曾經屬於科里爾百科全書(Collier』s Encyclopedia)的出版公司。Kickstarter的辦公室則是在下東區一個粗糙的loft敞開式公寓里，裡面有回收再利用的儲藏櫃和錫制白 鐵天花板。（該公司目前正在翻新一個新的辦公地點，位於布魯克林綠點區一座曾經屬於伊貝哈德·法貝爾鉛筆公司[Eberhard Faber Pencil Company]的建築。）

大多數的紐約科技企業都仍然在曼哈頓，但卡普已經遷移到了威廉斯 堡。眾所周知，那裡並不是CEO們通常聚集的地方。事實上，卡普和他的女友蕾切爾·伊克利(Rachel Eakley)曾經在西村嘗試過一段時間，但並不喜歡他們所在的位置。於是他開始搜尋「老建築」，然後發現他更喜歡布魯克林。據卡普所說，那裡塗了「太多 的石膏牆」，糟蹋了像翠貝卡這樣的街區。卡普的公寓還有完美的曼哈頓東區天際線景觀光景。他望出去，能看見由奧斯卡·內邁耶(Oscar Niemeyer)和勒·柯布西耶(Le Corbusier)設計的聯合國大樓群組，寬廣的塔樓能反射水景和天空。正是這樣的風景最終促成了這個決定，也讓卡普相信他可以離開那個小島。他開始覺 得，眺望曼哈頓要「比身在西村遙望當中看見澤西島要酷太他媽多了」。但也並不是說一切就完美了：他看到的景觀也包括忽然冒出來的不倫不類的住宅樓，影響了 布魯克林東河(East River)沿岸的風景。他說，「當我看到這些巨大的玻璃怪物時，我真是覺得噁心，」他說，那看起來就像是「某些從佛羅里達來的東西」。他痛斥指責那一片 「平淡平無奇、乏善可陳的建築」，說它們的「設計師就是覺得當代建築就是巨大的玻璃大廈」。「那東西把我噁心壞了。」

曾有一段時間，要想在科技業界出人頭地，就得意味着從東岸搬到西 岸，那裡是工程師和風投資本集中的地方。不過，卡普或者Tumblr在短期內搬到硅谷似乎是非常不可能的事情，其中最主要的原因是這當中，品味是其中一個 最主要的原因。「如果我對硅谷還有什麼更大的意見的話，」卡普說，那就是「你真得是有病才會住在帕洛阿爾托」。

本文最初發表於2013年9月11日。
翻譯：邵智傑

本文內容版權歸紐約時報公司所有，任何單位及個人未經許可，不得擅自轉載或翻譯。